// Blooming Ashes //

And if one day everything disappeared ? If we shall be forced to start on a blank slate, what would remain ? Ornament as final refuge. Metamorphosis as our last subterfuge.

The woman is a vessel dressed in veils of false modesty, entwined in body jewels holding flight. Pleated terra cotta silk crepe playing like soft shells. The crease is pushed to its climax: it does not reshape the body but the space around it.

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« The problem is not how to make a fold but how to continue it, across the ceiling, carrying it into the infinity,» wrote Gilles Deleuze*.

When all must be reinvented, the woman transforms and recovers her lost powers. Sheltered in a fur dress crafted like a mosaic adorned with laser-cut leather scales by textile designer Coen Carsten, she becomes a persona of a mythology yet to be written.

She is a shaman in all her power and apparent fragility, entwined with braided earth red leather harnesses turned into falsely protective bustiers. As she metamorphoses, her skin is laced with fragile lianas made of embroidered branches aspiring to softly constrain her body.

Her strength is her beauty. A mixed coated cotton jumpsuit sculpts her amazon body in magma orange. She wears fragile chainmail mesh or armor like second skins composed with copper wired snaps. A victorious woman, veiled and unveiled in her delicate jersey and embroidered chain dress, stripped of any artifice. A powerful and paradoxical woman who builds her armor with all that remains, with an instinctive gesture.

A woman from the depths, dressed in iridescent organza composed of pin tucks cascades. A creature clothed in light from the limbo in her dress made of LEDs and piano strings co-created with sculptor Bastien Carré. A bioluminescent creature mysteriously emerging from the abyss. Where survival rises into the sublime…

* Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, The Midnight Editions, June 29, 2011.

// Shed my Skin //

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In life it is the moments of transformation that are the most powerful. Moving from the familiar to become something distinct is when we are, in equal measures, courageous and at our most fragile. A metamorphosis of the body and soul, that casts off the past and proclaims a new beginning.

It is this crucial juncture that Yiging Yin decided to explore with her couture collection. Choosing the imagery of a snake shedding its skin as a metaphor for her designs, Yin explored the many layers of this very particular state of innovation.

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“There is a notion, when an animal is transforming, or a woman, that there is a sense of pain at first, a sort of violence. But paradoxically there is also the softness of a new skin, a rebirth,” said the designer.

The use of lace that echoes the graphic patterns of a snake’s skin is intertwined into her designs. Their unique patterns further highlighted by the addition of individual laser cut “scales” or the introduction of devore silk that brings to mind the idea of something being peeled away. Flat and three-dimensional embroidery come together to give a textural sense of rippling evolution. While the insertion of actual discarded Green Python skin, renowned for its unique opaque white appearance, brings a frisson of the literal into the language of this oeuvre.

The ensembles have been crafted to coil about and over a woman’s forms. They conceal or unveil the skin within as the wearer moves through life. Their construction also alludes to the idea of renewal in the way the garments look barely suspended on the body. As if they too were about to be shed. This is contrasted with the more protective oversized carapace pieces that lightly envelope and protect.

A sensually sense of movement also permeates the collection. The use of lurex fabrics give the illusion of garments crafted as if from liquid metal. But that mobility is also integrated into the silhouettes themselves. They too can transform into a new entity simply by unbuttoning a panel of a silk skirt, fastening a long sleeve to the shoulder or gathering a fabric at the waist.

“I like the idea that clothing can be a reminder of the presence of the absence of something,” said Yin. “Clothing are witnesses to a person’s life, there is a poetry to that.”

// Oxymore //

Yiqing Yin has made a step aside. After having explored her dreamlike world populated by mutating creatures for several seasons, filled with morphing characters – be they animal or vegetal – she has extracted their essence. She has recentered herself, thus focusing on form, fabric, and the self. As it were a return to the centre, the middle, the fragile point of equilibrium. An assertion of her codes. This collection is all about mediation.

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The body is at the centre of everything. The body as the stakeholder of the present cloth architecture. No devices, no corset, no fake answers, no false pretenses. Almost the naked truth. The truth of a body living under its garment, unconstrained. But never abandoned still. This collection is all about breathing.

The clothes are sculptures taken to the boundaries of paring, where the search for essentials and the abstraction of gesture converge towards liberation. The drapes are instinctive and thrown in, with fluid washed or liquid silks and alpaca which seem to have been tied around the body, in the simplest fashion, like a casual wrapping process. Fabrics seem to flow like rivers, most naturally. Whereas it isn’t so. Everything is under control, right down to the last millimetre, though it does not show. This collection is all about momentum.

Angles and curves collide and merge. The masculine tayloring ends up deconstructed in spite of itself, changing its nature, but not its gender. From linear, it fades to a blur. The layers of printed muslin and satin create kinetic optical effects and vibrations.

A stripped down to the basics palette which defines best this self-found and majestic woman part of a whole line of other women by displaying as a second skin a tattoo both ancestral and futuristic. Tribal and at the same time primitive, the burn-out jersey acts as a second skin, one which would be tattooed down to the core. Swarowski crystals cast a silhouette of light. This collection is all about melody.

// Moth //

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Silk saturniids in hues of bark, lichen or rock, woven chrysalises. Nocturnal glows and dawn illuminations, subdued yet dazzling, Amnésie, Météore, Brise, Voltige, Cocoon and thirteen other moths spread wings of nyctalopic beauty. Gravitating in the realm of myriad metamorphoses, they explore their paths of obsession and uncertainty. A frenetic dance in the dust, a spun envelope, a speckled fox cocoon coat.

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Feathery armour, liquid organza, plays of illusion and dilution, earthy, powdery shades and metallic gleams, all lend these sphingids the aura of a body turned robe, that breath of eternity in the ephemeral, that allegory of the instant and forever: Haute Couture.

// Les Rives de Lunacy //

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Reflexion of sea foam, touches of glittering colours, brief flash of silver ray emanating from the moon, everything results full of peace and serenity.

This collection is about element intersection. Floating clouds, torrents of light, imaginary corals: heavens and the abyss meet in a deceptive calm to dress Yiqing Yin woman.

// Sur le Fil //

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Yiqing Yin patiently continues to develop her thoughts about time that makes things grow and decompose, and about ties that bind and break with a fashion show that combines her designer and ready-to-wear lines.

The clothes fit the body like a second skin, as if they come from the body itself to surround it in mobile suspension, in levitation. Flesh and fabric entwine, embroideries with Swarovski crystals and beads appear as precious growth from the skin, revealing a new reality.

Yiqing Yin creates a common thread between soft and structured, textile and metal, chance and necessity. It is the thread of a story, memory, thought. The thread is sometimes lost, sometimes tight or sometimes left dangling. The fine thread that, along with others, ends up woven, knotted, braided to become something solid. However, when it is pulled, it frays, unweaving the fabric and the story.

The idea becomes a narrative of embroidered threads, each made in Yiqing Yin’s workshop, using metallic iron bandages, sculpted and polished by artist, Nora Renaud.

Thread embroideries are omnipresent. They are on dresses as well as veils that cover faces, redefining their features, duplicating and blurring their identity to reveal another. Threads fall on cheeks like tears. They seem to have been placed in a random way. However, each embroidery of threads, crystals or beads, is precisely placed and sketched beforehand, perfectly symmetrical, in an apodictic order, to create a meticulous composition.

Elegantly pleated organza jerseys naturally create alternating sequences of light and shadows. Long threads flow along the body, or collect in certain areas, rhinestones create strategic connecting points. Tone on tone Swarovski crystals are treated like dust that contaminates and nibbles away at the raw threads. Mineral elements respond to vegetal ones. Everything seems to escape human will yet everything is ordered by that same will.

For her ready-to-wear collection, Yiqing Yin borrows from the Escorial, usually reserved to men’s fashion, for jackets, vests, pants, dresses, vibrant on the surface and textured inside and out with micro-jacquard patterns. A tied-untied black crepe jumpsuit, a felted wool and silk dress on draped gazar, a wet-look, acid-burned ostrich feather cape in four shaded colors, a black sheath dress skimmed with a scar-like seam, a heavy cashmere coat with an ultra-light chiffon train…Each piece follows the thread of thought about deceiving appearances, changing lines, combined opposites, the fluctuating state of matter. As if to prove that nothing is frozen, nothing is impossible.

// Spring of Nüwa //

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Yiqing Yin’s new Autumn-Winter 2012-2013 collection re-imagines the female form in a world of purely mineral and vegetable composition.

The designer’s hand remains assuredly her own throughout excursions into bold and new galaxies of ever-shifting shades and shapes where tones blend and merge. Red remains pure while a slate grey betrays celestial glimmerings. Silver and blue fade into one.

Inviolably light cascades of satin and muslin offer oblique suggestions of chasteness through their mounting layers.

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<style=”text-align: justify;”>Skin is laid bare beneath pink-besprinkled tulle while liquid billowings of organza sparkle iridescent. This material delicacy finds its counterpoint in raw unfinished linens.
<style=”text-align: justify;”>Yiqing Yin constructs her volumes through a series of metamorphoses enacted upon the body. Rough surfaces are honed and liquid matter sculpted in pursuit of the right weight.

This dispersion of form, achieved through a studied structural disassembly, finds further expression in the prints where lines morph into ribs and voids before unravelling into loose edges.

Clothed in cloud, this woman is at once incorporeal, intangible, oneiric and enigmatic. A utterly simple paradox, she remains mistress of all she reveals of herself and her body.

presents couture alongside a ready-to-wear line. Garments are hand-made in Yin’s studio, each bea­ring the mark of the designer’s hand.

In Carne, the collection showed last January, is to be distributed at Montaigne Market, Paris ; Saks Fifth Avenue, New York; Joyce in Hong-Kong and Beijing and at 10 Corso Como in Milan and Seoul.

// In Carne //

A new grace, the woman carries it as an evidence of her origin, her organic energy and vital strength.

The monochromatic silhouettes is where this energy and strength find the possibility of transforming and recreating life on the inside and outside of themselves.

The fluid dresses in silk, alcantara, jersey, organza provides it own liberty and movement.

The woman is dressed with animal, plant, mineral, liquid and solid lifeforms.

The fabrics are blended, as the skin welcomes the water, the wind, the storms, the sunburns, the initiation of the forest and the times.

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Life is always moving ahead regardless, it creates and changes everything in a way.
The colors are those from the earth, the moss and from the reconstructed experiences.
From the black to the off-white, gold before it shines, a non-permanent grey, the ton-sûr-ton provides it the opening of one new passing.
The surfaces clash into themselves and they reconstruct on their own as stratums.
The skin gets fed, marked and blended. The fur is razed, the laces bring back a primitive architecture like the blend of stones and crystals brings us to the seabed. The velvet is luminous like human heat.
The structure is totemic, vertical, the work with the volumes are based into the points of equilibrium of a self-conscious female that builds it own singularity.
The dress holds one point on the shoulders, on the hips or under the waist.
Sometimes winged, aquatic, open, wrapped or veiled, it is not about shining, but living free in the middle of chaos, in an ice floe or in a forest.
The movement is always present when the metamorphosis is operating .
The body of the Yiqing Yin woman is made to shelter the evolution of an universe that keeps changing and that does not fear the metamorphosis.
The animality without being provocative, the animality accepts the elegance of the simplicity where the body breaths.

// Ouvrir Vénus //

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« Being, of its own accord, joins in the terrible dance whose syncopation is the dancer’s rhythm, and which we must learn to accept for what it is − knowing only the horror with which it is in perfect harmony. If we lack the courage to do so, no greater torture exists for us. And the moment of torture will never fail to arrive : how, if it failed to do so, should we overcome it? But the open spirit − open to death, to torture, to joy − without reserve, the open and dying being, suffering and happy, already appears in a veiled light : the light of the divine.

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And the cry which, from a twisted mouth, may twist and wring the being that utters it, is an immense alleluia − lost in a silence without end. »

// Exil //

Exil collection presents Yiqing Yin exploration of an oneiric and paradoxical universe, at the core of the designer DNA.
Thousands of pleats, modernization of smocks technique, drapery and voluptuous haziness: these are the new designer signatures.
Expressing new textile dimensions is the aim. Delicacy and stiffness meet to create the perfect balance.

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Yiqing Yin woman is a paradoxical one. Delicate as clouds whirling around her silhouette, she wears armors made of the lighest silk.
Hidden under pleats, her body is revealed when she gets into motion.
Exil writes the first chapter of Yiqing Yin new story.